The nationwide shortage of staff caused by Covid and Brexit is playing havoc with businesses in the worlds of beauty, therapy and hospitality – but one company that’s retained its staff and is finding it easy to recruit more is The Massage Company.
Widely viewed as an industry disruptor with a gym-style membership model that’s proving highly popular with clients, The Massage Company reports none of the staffing problems that its rivals in spas and salons all over the UK are experiencing.
And while the tens of thousands of unfilled vacancies continue to hit the headlines, The Massage Company’s staff are getting on with the job and remaining loyal to the increasingly profitable business.
“Our staff retention has been way ahead of the rest of the industry, says Charlie Thompson, The Massage Company’s Founder and Managing Director.
“We ran a significant amount of staff training during lockdown and that meant we retained our staff because they stayed interested and engaged with what we were doing.
“They stayed loyal to us, whereas in other businesses they were left alone to their own devices to go off and think about lots of other things they could do instead.
“The training was delivered by our team and we put our staff in front of the camera and gave them tasks to do.
“They realised they were part of something as we’ve created a sense of team fellowship.
“Despite the staffing crisis out there at the moment, we’re broadly not feeling it. We would like more staff and are recruiting, but we’re not in panic mood scrambling for them.
“Our team want to carry on working with us, and what turnover there is has largely been on the front desk rather than the therapy team. That’s key.
“We recruited and picked up new people because we knew we’d have a huge bow-wave of bookings once we were allowed to reopen our doors.”
Those staff are being kept busy at all five centres, with an average of 250 new members a month coming to each.
And those clients are coming more regularly and paying for longer treatments, making franchises’ businesses more profitable and more quickly than they’d expected. • If you’d like to know more about becoming a franchisee of The Massage Company,
